2018 non-fiction. HMS Erebus had already travelled to the Ross Ice
Shelf; in 1845, she was sent to search for the Northwest Passage, and
never came back.
This is the start of my experiment with Book of the Week, a
Radio 4 programme which condenses a book down to something like 10% of
its original content to be read out in 15-minute chunks over the
course of a week.
So "the story of a ship" is very much cut down in this format, with
only a brief mention of the ship's early life and the Antarctic trip,
to concentrate on the preparations for and departure of the Franklin
Expedition. After the last outside sighting, the viewpoint shifts to
the attempts to find the expedition, and the wilful denials once
evidence started to come in. (Even now there are monuments crediting
Franklin with finding the Northwest Passage, which he fairly clearly
didn't, though he was on the right track; the mapping done by
expeditions looking for Franklin was far more significant.)
There's some reconstruction of what may have happened, but Palin
wisely avoids excessive speculation; and it seems that the lead-solder
and botulism theories are looking quite shaky these days.
It feels incomplete, but any honest book about the expedition must be;
whether the reason was excessive lead, zinc deficiency, botulism, or
just the extreme cold, it's clear that the members of the expedition
were suffering from severely diminished mental capacity; their
surviving notes are fragmentary at best, and while one can trace some
of their movements it's impossible now to say what may have motivated
them. This abridgement is framed with Palin's feeling of loss after
the "One Down, Five to Go" Monty Python shows in 2014 and his search
for some meaningful activity to follow them, and his nearly-successful
attempt to travel to the site of the wreck after it had been
discovered in 2014.
Very slight, but enjoyable. I don't think I'm likely to read the
actual book, but this is a pleasing taste of it.
See also Landseer's Man Proposes, God
Disposes.
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